The Five Crucial Principles That Have Been Left Out of Yoga Teacher Trainings | Mark Whitwell

The origin of modern Yoga lies in the life of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), a man revered around the world as the ‘teacher of the teachers’ and ‘the father of modern Yoga.’

Krishnamacharya was teacher to many of the main figures of twentieth century Yoga: Pattabhi Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, Indra Devi, and T.K.V. Desikachar, who was his son.

If you have been to a Yoga class in a studio or have attended a teacher training, Krishnamacharya is likely to be at the source of what you practice or teach.

Curiously however, several key principles that Krishnamacharya emphasized have been left out over the course of Yoga’s incredible rise in popularity. Krishnamacharya’s teaching that Yoga must be adapted to the individual and his absolute insistence on breath-participation as very the purpose of asana are difficult to find in the myriad offerings of the yoga world.

And so, in any city in the world today, everywhere you look you can find what is called ‘yoga’; but for the most part it is largely unfulfilling activity.

We sense that there is something profound for us in this thousands-year-old tradition. But like playing cards with a deck that is missing several cards, the popular practices never quite resolve into ‘santi’ or peace.

A gifted scholar, Krishnamacharya spent the early part of his life studying the religious traditions of India. An expert in the fields of Sanskrit and Vedanta, and gaining the equivalent of 6–7 PhDs, Krishnamacharya concluded from his scholarship that an actual Yoga practice was required in order to realize the ideals of religious text.

As a young man, Krishnamacharya searched for an authentic teacher who could give him a full Yoga education. He was directed to a Yogi named Ramamohan Brahmacharyi who lived in the Tibetan Himalayas in a cave system with his family.

Krishnamacharya lived and studied with Brahmacharyi for seven years. He then left the Himalayas, travelled to Mysore, and began to communicate the physical wisdom practices that he had received from his teacher to the world.

Together with his son Desikachar, Krishnamacharya distilled the immense education he received from his guru into five key principles of physical practice. At the heart of these principles is an insistence on the careful linking of body, breath and mind as the heart of Yoga sadhana.

Krishnamacharya’s son TKV Desikachar writes in The Heart of Yoga (1995):

“In our practice we concentrate on the body, the breath, and the mind. Our senses are included as part of the mind. Although it theoretically appears possible for body, breath, and mind to work independent of one another, the purpose of yoga is to unify their actions…

It is primarily the physical aspect of our practice that people see as yoga. They will rarely notice how we breathe, how we feel the breath, and how we coordinate our breathing with our physical movement; they tend to only see our flexibility and suppleness. Some may want to know how many asanas we have mastered or how many minutes we can stay in a headstand…

Much more important than these outer manifestations is the way we feel the postures and the breath. The principles that follow are ages old, developed by many generations of great yoga teachers. These principles describe in detail the asanas and the breath and, above all, how they relate to each other” (17).

When the breath-principles of Krishnamacharya are included in the yoga practices that derived from him (such as Astanga Vinyasa and Iyengar Yoga) then your practice becomes entirely your own: efficient, powerful and safe. It becomes your direct participation in the Power and Peace that is Life itself.

The five crucial principles of Yoga practice

Principle 1: The body movement IS the breath movement.

The first step in our yoga practice is to consciously link the breath movement with the body movement. The body movement supports the breath and the breath supports the body movement.

In fact, they are felt to be the same activity. We establish a consistent use of ujjayi breath throughout asana. Breath is with the mouth closed, moving through the nose, producing a soft sound at the base of the throat.

We connect all our movements to a particular aspect of the breath cycle: inhale, retention after inhale, exhale, and retention after exhale. The movement is there to support the breath not for its own sake.

In general, expansive movements tend go with the inhale supporting the movement of breath through the whole body. Whereas contracting movements tend to go with the exhale supporting the expulsion of breath from the body.

The breath brings clarity and peace to the mind.

Principle 2: The breath envelops the movement.

During asana, the breath begins before the movement starts and the breath concludes after the movement finishes. We put the movement in an envelope of the breath; or, the breath encompasses the movement.

If a natural ujjayi breath for us is six seconds then our movement will be four to five seconds long — allowing for the breath to initiate and roll over the end of the movement. You may need to move faster if you find yourself running out of breath before you have finished moving. We adjust our movement so that it fits within a comfortable breath.

This is an important technical principal. By allowing for the breath to initiate and conclude each movement, the mind is subordinated to the agency of the breath and the breath is the intelligence of Life itself.

As a result, the mind is linked to the breath and therefore to the whole body. The unitary movement of body, breath and mind is achieved.

As Krishnamacharya said, “You can cheat your body but you cannot cheat your breath. So make the breath the guru to the asana. Obey your guru!”

Principle 3: The inhalation is from above as receptivity, the exhalation is from below as strength.

Although Krishnamacharya was not able to acknowledge the tantric roots of his Yoga due to its negative associations in the public, it becomes clear through principle 3.

Asana and pranayama is the enactment of the tantric reality-principle of the union of opposites: the recognition that Reality Itself is made up of the union of two opposing yet inseparable forces: spirit/form, masculine/feminine, strength/receptivity, ascending energy/ descending energy.

The inhale is the enactment of the descending feminine aspect. It is drawn down the front of the body from above first filling the upper chest and ribcage and then moving the diaphragm downward of its own accord. Postures that go with the inhale are those which open, extend and lengthen the body.

The exhale is the enactment of the ascending masculine aspect. As the breath leaves the lungs, the belly is drawn in and up towards the spine. The breath moves from up the body and out.

Hatha Yoga is the union of opposites in your embodiment. The principle means by which we participate in this union is through merging the inhale and the exhale.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.